Baiter and Beyond

"You see, this isolation hospital was kept because in the old days they used to have boats come in and if they had fevers of any sort they were laying there. And especially there was a lot of typhoid in those days. My mother was nursing there until she was 70 – she did tremendous work.

My mother went there in 1911 with ten fever patients, and she single-handedly nursed them, and there was no electricity all the time we were there. There were only oil lamps and oil stoves and triplex. No hot water, mind – you had to heat it up... you can imagine it!

During the first war they had a lot of Australians, there was a lot of fever back then, and a lot of Australians in the First World War in this country. And I used to have messages like 'I can’t come home tonight, I can’t leave this boy – he's dying. I can't leave him. He's so far from his home and his mum.'"